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DevOps is not about the tools

That’s true, in the same way that agile is not about the tools either, it’s a set of ideas, concepts, best practices,…

Nice, but… how can I successfully implement it?

Tools can enable change in behavior and eventually change culture [Patrick Debois]

The same way the Guttemberg printer was a tool that enabled a cultural change, or that Agile development wouldn’t be possible without Continuous Integration servers, DevOps relies on some tools to implement its principles.

Unfortunately, the same way everyone thinks of themselves as being intelligent enough, and every tool out there is magically cloud enabled, now every tool claims to be DevOps.

However, there is agreement that tools that allow us to deal with infrastructure as code are key on implementing DevOps concepts.

It’s all been invented already, now it’s standardized with tools like Chef or Puppet. Before, you could write your own scripts to automate server installation, configuration,… but everyone would do it their very own way.

Now there’s some common language used by Puppet or by Chef, that allows to share and reuse configuration as modules or recipes.

Infrastructure as Code, a key concept

The concept that infrastructure should be treated as code is really powerful. Server configuration, packages installed, relationships with other servers,… should be modeled with code to be automated and have a predictable outcome, removing manual steps prone to errors. Doesn’t sound bad, does it?

But new solutions bring new challenges, and when infrastructure is code we face the same problems faced by developers.

What version of the infrastructure are we using in production?

how can we ensure that when an issue is found it gets fixed and redeployed?

how can we test the infrastructure as we develop it?

That’s why when dealing with infrastructure as code we should follow development best practices.

For instance we can (and should!)

tag, branch and release the code that define our servers.

have a lifecycle that covers different stages through the infrastructure code, ie. dev, QA, production.

Like this:

Hearing everywhere about DevOps and how it is all about automation, and how manual steps should be removed from Operations. Starting to worry about your OPs job?

On one hand, yes, you should worry.

My job is to make other people’s jobs unnecessary.

While I was working on Maven the goal was to automate and standardize all the build steps so there’s no more need to have a magician build master that is the only one that knows how to build the software. All Maven projects are built in the same way and there’s no need to do any manual step. That ended the build master job in many companies as they knew it. Those that were interested enough moved on to do more useful tasks, like setting up continuous integration servers, integrating new quality assurance tools, adding metrics,…

So, on the other hand, no, you shouldn’t worry as long as you want to explore new areas, because there’s still plenty to improve. Stop doing tedious manual tasks and focus on what’s really important.